"Sometimes I lie awake at night and I ask where have I gone wrong? Then a voice says to me - This is going to take more than one night... In the Book of life, the answers aren't in the back."...Charlie Brown

Monday, June 20, 2011

"House-cleaning....................."

I was cleaning out my old e-mails this weekend and re-visited a story sent to me about a seminary instructor quoting another man’s brief synopsis of the Church’s history as follows: “Christianity,” it began, “started in Palestine as a fellowship, moved to Greece and became a philosophy, spread to Italy and turned into an institution, taken to Europe and evolved into a culture, and finally brought to America where it is now an enterprise.” Then, to better clarify that last term to his young students, he repeated it and added: “a business.” When a young girl, though, raised her hand to ask if it wasn’t Biblically supposed to be a “body”, he was without words momentarily, simply somewhat stuttering “yes” in reply, and she quizzically continued: “But if a body becomes a business, isn’t it a prostitute?”…… The rest of the tale, true or not, offered the instructor’s thoughts about the incident. My own, however, took me back to the temple where, Jesus, Himself, as a child, wondered why Mary and Joseph didn’t realize that He must be about His “Father’s business”; and it seems to me that the accusation only possesses validity in so much as we, as believers, market the Gospel for self-gain. Guilty as charged? That takes an individual self-examination overseen by the Holy Ghost…..